The Division of Materials Research and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure contribute funding to this CAREER award. This award supports theoretical and computational research, and education on developing new computational methods to study non-equilibrium behavior of strongly correlated materials and nanostructures. In particular new algorithms will be developed to further enhance and expand the applicability of a recently developed time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method and to enable its use to attack fundamental problems in nonequilibrium strongly correlated materials and nanostructures.

The PI will use the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method to advance timely open problems, that will address fundamental questions, including: What are the universal scaling laws governing far from equilibrium transport? What are the fundamental processes in the coherent dynamics and decoherence of many-body systems? How does integrability affect thermalization and equilibration of systems out of equilibrium? The PI will focus on the specific problems:

+ understanding the correlations, transients, and time-scales involved in the operation of quantum gates, for quantum information processing;

+ understanding the equilibrium and non-equilibrium behavior of one-dimensional and quasi one-dimensional strongly correlated systems in the presence of spin-charge separation and Kondo correlations at zero temperature and at finite temperatures - the spin-incoherent regime;

+ understanding time-dependent phenomena in ultracold atomic gases, with an eye to probe and realize novel quantum phases of matter;

This project is computationally intensive and involves developing new numerical techniques. Students will learn valuable analytical and computational skills that will better prepare them to join the technologically savvy modern workforce. The PI will proactively recruit students from underrepresented groups. Computational tools developed in the course of the award will be made freely available and open-source through the Algorithms and Libraries for Physics Simulations project, which has already provided enormous benefits to the scientific community. These tools include the development of an educational software toolkit that contains visualization, data analysis, provenance, and simulation packages. These activities will contribute to the formation of new generations of computational condensed matter physicists. Through the ALPS project, the PI will contribute to a book on computational condensed matter, the organization of workshops, and teleteaching. A series of public lectures is also planned, to complement and enhance department outreach activities.

NONTECHNICAL SUMMARY

The Division of Materials Research and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure contribute funding to this CAREER award. This award supports research and education with a strong computational flavor to advance fundamental understanding in important areas that involve quantum mechanical states that change in time. The PI will develop new computational methods and use them to make progress on fundamental problems that involve materials and structures of atoms which have dimensions some 100,000 times smaller than a human hair. The materials and structures of interest contain electrons that interact strongly with each other leading to highly correlated motion. The research is focused on electrons that are driven far away from the placid stable state of equilibrium to a new nonequilibrium state. Among the questions that the PI will explore are how such a state relaxes back to the tranquility of equilibrium, and how fundamental signatures of a quantum mechanical system degrade.

This is fundamental research that may have impact on efforts to develop ever smaller electronic devices with higher performance. It may also have impact on the discovery of new phenomena and is focused in part on how to prepare and manipulate quantum mechanical states to perform quantum computation and novel electronic device functions.

This project is computationally intensive and involves developing new numerical techniques. Students will learn valuable analytical and computational skills that will better prepare them to join the technologically savvy modern workforce. The PI will proactively recruit students from underrepresented groups. Computational tools developed in the course of the award will be made freely available and open-source through the Algorithms and Libraries for Physics Simulations project, which has already provided enormous benefits to the scientific community. These tools include the development of an educational software toolkit that contains visualization, data analysis, provenance, and simulation packages. These activities will contribute to the formation of new generations of computational condensed matter physicists. Through the ALPS project, the PI will contribute to a book on computational condensed matter, the organization of workshops, and teleteaching. A series of public lectures is also planned, to complement and enhance department outreach activities.

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